Nurit Bird-David

Bird-David studied economics and mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (BA cum laude 1975) and social anthropology at Cambridge University, Trinity College (PhD 1983).[3] Her doctoral work was conducted with the Nayaka people in South India, studying their social system. Bird-David has been a research fellow at New Hall, Cambridge (1985-1987).[4] She was appointed as a lecturer in sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University (1987-1995) and then moved in 1994 to Haifa University. She became associate professor in 2008, and full professor in 2017. She was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge (Smuts Institute for Commonwealth Studies, 1991), at Harvard University (2008) and at University College London (2017).

Bird-David is a member of the Advisory Board of the World Council of Anthropological Associations.[5]

Much of her work is based on her early ethnographic fieldwork on the Nayaka. Bird-David began working with them in 1978, a decade before governmental and nongovernmental agents reached them, and has since continued to study their changing lifeways for four decades.[6]

Bird-David is most well-known for her work on animism and more-than-human relations of contemporary hunter-gatherer peoples. Studying the Nayaka, she noted their approach to the natural environment as a community of related humans and nonhumans. Bird-David argued that this animistic approach embodies a mode of knowing and being in the world that can be called a “relational epistemology”[7]. In turn, she claimed that this mode fosters an intimate understanding of the environment[8] and shapes manifold aspects of hunter-gatherer cultures, such as affluent economies[9], sharing[10], communication with ancestors, illness-healing practices, and parent-child relations[11]. Her works have since been highly cited and referenced in studies discussing animism, hunter-gatherer cultural life, and more-than-human perceptions of the environment.[12][13][14] She is often credited as being among the initiators of the anthropological re-visitation of animism,[15][16] leading to a new academic discourse on human and non-human relations, and standing at the root of the ontological turn in anthropology.

In 2018 Bird-David received the award of life achievement by the International Society for Hunter Gatherer Research (ISHGR).

Bird-David's experience with hunter-gatherers led her to consider other cases of indigenous small-scale societies, particularly the significance of the concept of scale in anthropological theory. Ethnographically describing the distinctive phenomenological and cultural experiences of life in minuscule hunter-gatherer societies, she argues that Anthropology has long neglected group size, horizons of concerns, and scalability in describing and explaining such small-scale worlds and comparing them to larger-scale societies (especially global society and nation-states).[17][6][18]

Bird-David's interest in small-scale communities, scale, and perceptions of the environment, has led her to later study cultures of home in the neoliberal and digital age.[3] Extending the notions of intimate communal structures and scalability developed in her previous research, she studied home-construction and home-design practices in Israeli society, and is currently conducting a cross-cultural study of Airbnb home-sharing with strangers. In these projects Bird-David examines the relation between digitally-enabled huge scales of connectivity, and small-scale cultures of home and daily living.